1. Know that God is a spirit (John 4:24). “He is not far from every one of us” said the apostle Paul, quoting a poet, “for in Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:27, 28) Paul was speaking at the time to idolatrous Greeks who thought that Zeus was the supreme deity in a whole pantheon of superhuman gods – none of which was thought by them to be a purely spiritual being. But the true God is a spirit, not a mixture of flesh and spirit.
2. “A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” Jesus said this after his resurrection. In other words, a spirit has no human form (Luke 24:39). Jesus Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3). Your role is to become more and more like Jesus so that you increasingly mirror his glory through a process of spiritual transformation (Ephesians 3:18).
3. God not only dwells in you but also “walks” in you by His Spirit (2 Corinthians 6:16). He moves you to do some things and He moves when you do some things, just as He moved Jesus from time to time. At times it was to heal people who drew on his power, and at other times when he was “moved with compassion” by their plight. So don’t just “leave it to God” to move you but rather be ready to be “moved with compassion,” because there are times when God will move when you move. (The four lepers who walked out into the Twilight Zone and thereby saved a starving city demonstrated that.)
4. Your body is God’s temple (2 Corinthians 6:9). The ancient Greek word refers to the inner shrine of a temple. This means that God has enshrined Himself in your body, not just in your spirit. Many religions treat the human body as an unworthy, unholy thing from which the spirit or the soul needs to escape to be pure. The Christian faith honours the believer’s body as the temple of God’s Spirit.
5. Christ is being “formed” in you and “fashioned” in your godly lifestyle (Mark 16:12; Galatians 4:19). The ancient Greek word for “formed” (“morphed”) means that you are being changed from the inside out and so are becoming more and more like Jesus day by day. “Fashion” (Greek: schema) is to “form” what clothing is to a mannequin; the fashion should complement the form. (For other uses of schema see 1 Corinthians 7:31 and Philippians 2:7)
6. The Apostle Paul wrote of Christ and the believer as inseparable. He did so in the context of a sinful sexual relationship, but the same applies to a holy relationship, because just as those who fornicate become “one flesh”, those who are joined to the Lord are “one spirit.” (1 Corinthians 6:15, 16)
7. God seeks to reveal His Son in us so that we can preach him to others (Galatians 1:15). In the final analysis what we minister most effectively is what is most real in our lives.
Note: Steps 1 and 2 both relate to who God is; i.e. that He is a Spirit. Steps 3 to 6 relate to the body as His chosen dwelling. Step 7 relates to God reaching out through us to others as Christ is formed in us and we are fashioned so that we attract others to him. As immature believers we preached a Christ we had not known beyond our conversion experience. But as more mature believers we know that God wants to reveal that He is in us by showing Christ to others through our attractiveness to them and our loving acts toward them.
The Big Question, of course, is how much we are willing to let Him change our attitudes as much as our actions.